


The House Always Wins

by parabolica (orphan_account)



Category: Imperial Steamworks Series - James Ng
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 07:04:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12007572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/parabolica
Summary: In the Imperial City, one has to adapt in order to stay ahead.





	The House Always Wins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snowynight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowynight/gifts).



This was her favourite time of day. Early morning, when the drum tower sounded the hour of the rabbit, and the last of her clients scurried home. When the south gate was opened and farmers and merchants streamed into the city, bringing with them the noise and smells of the land outside. When the steamed bun sellers began crying their wares, boasting that their fare was better than anything the machines sold—and it was probably true, for the bots stuck to a set of precise ingredients, and you could never bargain down a bot as you could a human.

Shi Hong settled into her chair. Her window, with its elaborate sandalwood screen, looked out over the street. The neighbourhood was awakening. Down there, outside the apothecary’s shop, Old Zhao clutched an empty wine jar and railed against his fate. He’d been the keeper of the drum tower, a hereditary position and one that should have seen him set for life, until the Empress had ordered the installation of a steam-powered clock that struck the great drum on the hour. Technology was more accurate and cost-effective, said the imperial decree. Technology made life easier for the citizens of the Middle Kingdom.

Except Old Zhao now lived in the gutter, and his son had taken a job in the imperial factories in Shandong, making parts for the imperial airships; and when the mechanism in the drum tower was first installed, it ran too fast and struck too hard, puncturing the skin of the ancient drum, and for three months the drum tower had stood silent.

Sunlight struggled through the clouds choking the sky. Shi Hong sniffed the air. Perhaps it would rain today. An ominous haze already hung over the city, thick with the red dust of the western deserts. The Northern Capital was her adopted home, her home by marriage, but sometimes she hated it, this arid place of sandstorms and cold winters with its huddled hutongs cramped around the imperial city.

It was so different to the place of her birth. Suzhou, in the south, was a place of water and gardens, where all was elegance and timeless sophistication, and the air was mild enough that the strings of her _guqin_ only needed to be tightened once a year. The daughter of a poetess and a gentleman scholar who’d placed fifth in the imperial examinations, Shi Hong had been courted by the sons of the city’s elite. They’d praised her beauty, her wit, her skill with music, but she’d thrown away a life of cloistered luxury and eloped with a handsome northerner with a broken nose and a glint in his eye.

Qing Ming had brought steam power to Suzhou. Trifles, they were, clockwork birds that fluttered and sang, bots that chopped vegetables. The citizens of Suzhou exclaimed over the new devices, but had dismissed them. Steam power was a novelty, the plaything of the very wealthy. No one believed it would become so ubiquitous in such a short time.

But Qing Ming had believed, and Shi Hong had believed, too. He’d told her of the wonders of the industrialised north, of how the streets were swept daily by bots, how bots served food in all the restaurants, how the Empress herself was becoming mechanised, replacing diseased human flesh with shiny, perfect metal parts that would last for ten thousand years.

Shi Hong sighed, digging her bare toes into the tiger-skin rug at her feet. Her husband had told her he’d shot the tiger for her. A lie, of course. Almost everything Qing Ming had told her had been a lie. The streets of the Northern Capital were so dusty, the only way the bots could clean them was if men went ahead of the machines, sweeping the worst of the dirt away. The only restaurants that had dim sum and soup bots were those patronised by senior palace officials and the aristocracy. She’d been disappointed with her new home, this closed-off hutong far removed from Suzhou’s linked pavilions with swooping roofs set in beautiful, perfect gardens.

She’d been disappointed in her husband, too. Not in the marriage bed, for he’d excelled at that particular game; but in everything else he was a coward and a liar. He wasn’t an imperial engineer, as he’d claimed in Suzhou; he was a minor triad boss who’d inherited the loyalty owed to his father and squandered it in bad deals.

Worse still, he’d told her he had influence at court, that he would arrange for her to join the imperial musicians. It would be easy, he’d said, for a woman of her talent to play for the pleasure of the Empress. Except the Blackguard, the elite imperial servants, had replaced the court musicians with a mechanised band.

Music played by machine was in demand throughout the city. Even the meanest tea house could afford a few clockwork birds to sing popular songs. There was no call for real musicians or real music.

Shi Hong had adapted. Her husband’s gambling den—now her gambling den—the Prosperity Fortune, boasted a trio of mechanical musicians of her own design. They were not as polished in their looks as those belonging to the Empress, but Shi Hong was certain that her musicians played a wider range of tunes and performed with greater skill.

She still played the _guqin_ , on occasion. In autumn, when the moon was full and when her heart returned to the south. For the rest of the year, she was satisfied to listen to her mechanical musicians.

A heavy tread on the staircase. The creak of the door opening. Bo came across the floor, the susurrus of his silk robe at odds with the thud of his feet on the floorboards and the hiss of steam escaping from his mechanical arms. Her enforcer smelled of machine oil and sweat, a not unpleasant combination.

“For you, Madam.”

As was their custom, he handed her a paper bag containing two sweet buns purchased from the street-seller. She bit into the soft dough, releasing the heat and the taste of the red-bean paste within.

“How did we do?” Shi Hong asked around another mouthful.

“Up by three thousand.” From the leather pouch he wore around his waist, Bo took a sheaf of money and IOUs. “The Minister of War begs your indulgence and promises he will pay within the month.”

She laughed as she flicked through the notes. “He will pay sooner than that, or I’ll send the photographs of him and the Japanese attaché to the newspapers. It may simply have been an innocent game of _go_ , but a man can find his tongue loosened by congenial company and friendly rivalry. Who knows where their conversation wandered? The Empress’ health, the long-range capability of our airships…”

Bo smiled at her through a wisp of steam. “I’ll see to it myself, Madam.”

Shi Hong finished her breakfast and lit a cigarette, then resumed her study of the street outside. Carts rumbled past, laden with produce and pulled by oxen. No mechanised harvester or motorised transport for these poor farmers. Only the rich landowners could afford these innovations, which made them richer still—and then, she reminded herself, those landowners came to the Prosperity Fortune and lost great sums of money to her. 

She crossed one leg over the other, the silk of her cheongsam splitting to reveal the leather garter around her thigh. Throwing knives rested inside oiled sheaths. She hadn’t had to use them this month. Word must be getting around that the widow meant business.

Bo touched her right shoulder in a brotherly gesture, his mechanical hand tracing the dark blue designs inked into her skin. Those tattoos should have been her husband’s. Qing Ming was the gangster, not her. But he’d refused to mark his flesh, citing religious beliefs. Instead, he had Shi Hong tattooed in his place. “My wife is of my body,” he liked to say. “She represents me in all things.” And so she’d become the embodiment of his will, and the respect that should have been his came to her, and his ambition became hers, until he was no longer necessary.

“It’ll rain,” Bo said. “I can feel it in my shoulders.”

She nodded. The joins where mechanical arms had been spliced to bones always ached in changeable weather. She would help him oil the external moving parts later, to ease the pain.

Her husband had done this to him. Bo had been a member of the City Watchmen and a regular of the Prosperity Fortune before his transformation. Qing Ming had wanted an enforcer, one modified with the latest technology. But at that time, aside from the Empress, who had a legion of doctors and the Crystal Herbalist to prolong her life, no other human had been successfully grafted with a machine.

Qing Ming believed it was possible. He’d experimented on a dog, attaching a mechanical tail and a mechanical leg. Then he’d ordered his thugs to attack Bo one night. Bo had been beaten so badly he’d almost died. Qing Ming had saved him, but at a cost: His human arms were removed and replaced by mechanical arms, powered by steam. 

Shi Hong had nursed him back to health. It struck her to the heart to hear Bo speak of her husband in admiring terms. Bo truly believed that Qing Ming had saved him because he was a good man. Eventually, when Bo was well enough to listen, she’d told him the truth. That he was as much a creature of Qing Ming’s making as she was.

On the opposite side of the street, a man, tall, lean, his face shadowed by a straw hat surmounted by a peacock feather, slowed his pace. Pedestrians stepped out of his path; one or two glanced at him nervously. He ignored them, coming to a halt directly in the line of sight of her window. His mechanical arm flexed, spilling steam to dampen the fur worn around his collar. He looked up, tipping his hat. The black patch over his left eye gave him a sinister aspect, but even from this distance, Shi Hong knew his good eye was smiling.

Desire uncurled in her belly, heating her body. The Sheriff passed this way every morning and offered her greetings, even though he couldn’t possibly know whether or not she sat there to receive them.

“It’s the captain,” Bo said.

“Yes.” Bo had served with the Sheriff. Even now, she didn’t know which of them had killed her husband. After all this time, she supposed it didn’t really matter.

A bird flew at the window, tapping against the screen. It cheeped, its golden eyes glowing. Bo opened the screen enough for the creature to flutter inside. Steam escaped from its wing joints as it landed and hopped towards Shi Hong.

“Come here, little one.” She spoke to it as if it were real rather than mechanical, scooping the bird into her hands and setting it on her lap. It was a matter of moments to press on the correct feathers in the right sequence, thus encouraging the bird to disgorge a slip of paper. Written on it in fine script was a message.

“Good news, Madam?” Bo couldn’t read the secret women’s language that Shi Hong used to communicate with her network of girls.

“Very promising.” She read the note again. “Xu Hua will be arriving today with her new lover, Liu Meng Yao. He’s the son of a duke, with estates in Hangzhou and business interests in Shanghai. They’ll be taking rooms at the Jade Bowl tea house. Tonight she’ll bring Meng Yao to the Prosperity Fortune and encourage him to try his luck against the dice bots. He’s an imperial mathematician, and believes he can calculate the odds and defeat the best gambling bot the empire has to offer.”

“Is that what he thinks?” Bo gave a low rumble of laughter. “I hope he has a lot of money to lose.”

“He does.” Shi Hong smiled, feeding the crumpled note back to the clockwork bird. Inside its belly, the note would burn, to be excreted as ash. “He’ll be but the latest in a long line of people who learn that the house always wins.”

“I look forward to making his acquaintance.” Bo took his leave and withdrew, his footsteps fading as he clumped through the warren of corridors into another part of the house.

Shi Hong finished her cigarette, stubbed it out, and rose to her feet, brushing her skirts back into place. She tucked last night’s takings into the safe beneath a statuette of Guan Yin and went downstairs into the gambling den.

The rooms were in semi-darkness, the lights still powering down. Cleaning bots rolled about the floor, humming as they swept and vacuumed and squirted fragrance into the atmosphere. Dice bots and mah jonng bots stood frozen in place at baize tables, heads tipped downward and mechanical arms still. Behind the bar, waiter bots slid back and forth, replenishing stock.

She strolled over to the dais that housed the mechanical musicians. The instruments were silent, the mannequins slumped over the _pipa_ and _erhu_. Shi Hong pushed back the sleeves covering the disembodied arms of the _guqin_ player. Such pale skin, so flawless and muscular. She smiled, remembering how Qing Ming had used to hold her when they were first married. It was the memory of that tenderness that had prompted her to save his ruined body after his murder and put it to good use.

“Thank you, husband.” She bent and dropped a kiss on the lifeless hand poised above the strings, then walked out of the den.

The cleaning bot followed along behind, sweeping away her footprints.


End file.
